


remember me, love, when i'm reborn

by exbeekeeper



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Episode: s03e05 A Life in the Day, Episode: s04e05 Escape From the Happy Place, M/M, Pining, it's 3am don't @ me just take this, pining eliot, q and margo are just mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 09:23:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18117932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/exbeekeeper/pseuds/exbeekeeper
Summary: ... as the shrike to your sharp and glorious thorn.When Eliot’s trapped in his head, he spends a lot of time thinking. He thinks about a lot of things.The one thing he absolutely does not think about is the mosaic.Eliot knew, of course, that he was attracted to Quentin. He'd told Margo all about how goddamn pretty he was after even just their first meeting (and then been sold out the second she finally saw him, the traitor), had - if he’s being honest, and here in his mind there’s not much else to be - probably been half in love with Quentin since the coronation.(He doesn’t think about the coronation).





	remember me, love, when i'm reborn

**Author's Note:**

> they are so STUPID!!!! monster let el go already so they can kiss and be happy forever (that's how this show works right ha ha ha h)

Eliot has a lot of time to think when he’s trapped in his own head. There’s not much else to do, really. Somehow, when you know all the friends in your ‘happy place’ are just facsimiles of your friends created out of your memories to stop you from going crazy and none of the people you care about are actually there, it becomes a lot harder not to go crazy. So Eliot thinks. He thinks, for starters and in a very meta fashion, about the logic behind inventing friends to make yourself a little less miserable while you’re trapped in the prison of your own mind. 

… Sometimes Eliot thinks he should work at Hot Topic, writing T-shirt slogans of all the emo bullshit he says to no one because he’s trapped in the prison of his own mind.

At first he tries to avoid thinking about the heavy shit. He thinks about teaching Charlton about the ins and outs of the word fuck - “yes, it can go in the middle of words, it can be a gerund or whatever the adverb one is called (no, Eliot doesn’t remember intermediate latin, thank you for asking), when it’s a verb it means to have sex (yes, Charlton, to engage in coitus, thank you) and sometimes when it’s a noun it refers to the act of sex but sometimes it’s just an expletive--” - ad infinitum (take that, intermediate latin) until Eliot thinks he might kill Charlton the next time he hears the word coitus and then he’d be really alone, for real, with nothing but memories to keep him company and okay Hot Topic moving on. 

Eliot thinks about books. At first he thinks he won’t be able to conjure any up because he’s not Alice and the things he remembers are less academic and more alcoholic and the only things he’s got every word of saved in his mental lockbox are cocktail instructions, but then he remembers something Charlton said about watching him watch Lost in a memory and he conjures up a memory of the time he marathoned all eight Septimus Heap books in a week in high school and he reads them over his own shoulder and he thinks to himself that he wouldn’t have enjoyed them nearly as much as he did if he’d known about magic then. Fantasy, Eliot’s found ever since he was first spirited away to the Brakebills exam, just doesn’t have the same luster anymore. 

He finds the memory of the time he and Margo watched Spirited Away, and of the time he went down on Aaron instead of watching Kiki’s Delivery Service (he ignores his memory-self and Aaron, and cries at the end when the baby’s born), and he gets about halfway through Nausicäa with the physical kids’ cottage (who says he never did any good for his discipline?) when he realizes it’s all fucking pointless.

And so Eliot is back to the thinking. He thinks endlessly, without purpose. He thinks about Margo, clever and quick-witted and level-headed and selfless and compassionate. Mostly he thinks about all the ways he fucked up what’s quite probably the only half-decent relationship he ever had (because he’s not thinking about the mosaic, he can’t, not without breaking down entirely), how he put her in prison for a mistake that was barely her fault. She was put in an impossible position, and she did her best, and he punished her for it, as though it was up to him to discipline her, as though he had any right to talk to her about good choices. 

Speaking of Eliot’s very good choices, it turns out he can’t even get memory-drunk now that he knows it’s fake. His cocktails still taste fuckin’ impeccable, sure, and for a little while bartending for his memory-parties is something to do with his hands, but the alcohol itself doesn’t get him wasted like it should. It doesn’t seem fair, since he’s sure he can remember being drunk, but alas, his mind apparently wants him to suffer an eternity of his own thoughts without even the familiar comfort of substance abuse. 

He can’t sleep, either, but it’s not like the insomnia’s anything new. 

So he thinks about Margo. He hopes that if his friends in their infinite stubbornness - he’d love to say wisdom, but, well, Eliot’s not a liar (he said, you know, like a liar) - manage to get him out of this, they’ll get to be them again, Eliot-and-Margo, just two hedonistic, bitchy, one-dimensional partiers against the world. 

He doesn’t really hope for all of that, but it would be easier if he did. It was simpler back then - Eliot knew where he belonged, what he was supposed to be doing. He’s not so sure of who he is, now. He doesn’t think he’s a good person, and it’s weird as hell that he cares about it, but he does. However unsure he is of this new Eliot, though, he cannot deny that the new Margo has found her place. Eliot had known since their first Welter’s tournament that Margo was a king, but it’s another of his greatest shames that he hadn’t anticipated just how quickly she’d step up, how much she’d earn the crown. 

Eliot wouldn’t wish that away from her. He couldn’t. So instead he hopes they’ll find a new Eliot-and-Margo - not the perfect hosts and not the king and queen, but maybe something in the middle. The king and her sidekick, maybe. Eliot could be Margo’s sidekick - probably always has been. Anyway. The point is, when Eliot’s trapped in his head, he spends a lot of time thinking. He thinks about a lot of things. 

The one thing he absolutely does not think about is the mosaic. 

Eliot doesn’t think about finding the cottage, the decision to stay, how he’d known it was a bad idea from the way his hands had already been itching to press themselves into Quentin’s skin from the start. Eliot had known, of course, that he was attracted to Quentin. He had known from the beginning, had told Margo all about how goddamn pretty he was after even just their first meeting (and then been sold out the second she finally saw him, the traitor), had - if he’s being honest, and here in his mind there’s not much else to be - probably been half in love with Quentin since the coronation. 

(He doesn’t think about the coronation). 

Eliot does wonder, sometimes, if Quentin hadn’t kissed him, what he’d have done. He’d held out a year - one calendar year of Quentin’s strong arms and soft smiles, his accursed ponytail (Eliot is probably dying, he is allowed to be dramatic), his scruff and the smell of wood on his clothes, and he’d been going mad every second of it. 

Eliot represses most of the things he experiences right as he experiences them. He takes his thoughts and his feelings and his memories and he puts them in neat little boxes. Q’s kiss had been a deliverance, a gift, something precious, and it had gone immediately into a box labeled “precious things Eliot is not allowed to touch - FRAGILE.” This one, Eliot doesn’t think about because he doesn’t deserve it. That was a different Quentin, a different Eliot, a Quentin who chose his Eliot because he was the only one left. 

Eliot doesn’t get to look at that memory, because it makes him want it with his Quentin. And yeah, maybe he’s slept with Q before (hello, sleeping with other people’s boyfriends), but the sex is really not the problem. Eliot can want Quentin so bad that it hurts like a bruise that’s constantly being pushed, but he can’t ask for the softness mosaic-Eliot saw in mosaic-Quentin’s face when he pulled away. 

So he resolutely does not picture the look on Quentin’s face when Ted had been born, the way he’d held Q as he cried when Arielle left, the way Quentin looked at him with so much softness that it made him want to cry. Eliot doesn’t think about the way Q would help him rub salve from the healer down the mountain into his joints as he grew older, working the knots out of his muscles with gentle hands and so much care he feels like he’ll suffocate under it. Eliot doesn’t think about Ted leaving and he doesn’t think about Ted coming home, introducing them to the grandchildren.

And he makes himself focus on anything other than Quentin’s face when Eliot rejected him, right up until the minute memory-Q says something so fucking Q it hurts to remember he’s just Eliot’s projection. 

Then, he thinks about it. He thinks about Quentin’s face, the hope, snuffed out by his stupid fear, the love he’d seen there, unabashed, that had made him run like the coward he was. He had been scared. There was no other way to put it. Eliot had run, from something that could have been everything (something that was everything), because of his stupid fears.  
“Who gets proof of concept like that?”

There were a thousand thoughts, all swirling around, fighting to be the first to break Quentin’s heart:

That was when we didn’t have a choice. You’d never want me if you knew you could have anyone else. You shouldn’t want me. I’ll hurt you, just like I hurt everything. You deserve someone smart like Alice, or strong like Julia. I thought you were straight, Q. I can’t be your experiment. I don’t think I’ll survive it. I’m too into you. I’ll come on too strong. I think a little taste of what I want before it’s torn away will be worse than never knowing it at all.

And, above all of them, I don’t deserve you.

But Quentin is good, and true, and probably the best thing that ever happened to Eliot in any lifetime. And Q had put himself out there, for them, because he’d felt what Eliot felt, the overwhelming love born of years of friendship in this timeline and decades of devotion in another. 

For Quentin, Eliot can climb mountains. 

“If I get out of here, Q, know that when I’m braver, it’s because I learned it from you.”

**Author's Note:**

> ps my italics are an art but im too lazy to do the formatting rn. ill do it tomorrow or something


End file.
